Comments

As usual, I strongly recommend Bob Proctor’s book, Golden Holocaust … The cigarette companies hate this book so much they try to stop its name from even being mentioned in court.

I have since obtained this book and am about a third of the way through, which is already a considerable bit of reading for it is indeed a big volume.

Here is an extremely apt theme which conveys the sentiment of my reaction to big tobaccos antics, a theme which also describes the outcome of using this industry’s products.

The theme may be familiar to those who have watched ‘Top-Gun’. It is a little known factoid that the USN Top-Gun course was heavily influenced by the tactics ensconced in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm Air Warfare courses. The pilot who made his particular mark here later went on to reach the upper echelons of the South African Air Force.

This story has been well laid out by Rowland White in his book Phoenix Squadron which contains, in the hardback edition, a dozen or so of the photographs which I took whilst serving on 892 Phantom Squadron at the period of the book’s story.

It was my service in the RN which brought me into contact with duty-free cigarettes. I had my last cigarette, only about 5 to 10 per day btw, on the day I collapsed with a massive heart attack which destroyed a part of my heart muscle. And I was only worried about, and watching for signs of, respiratory disease.

So thank you John Mashey for helping me find more information on how I had been conned by those messages of false doubt about smoking’s deleterious health effects.

Oh! And with that Richard Siegmund Lindzen – I owe you one – here have a Camel.

Further on Lionel’s recommendation above: points we could be discussing rather than engaging in an undignified intramural spat –

Eli’s note on the interesting adventures of people who may perhaps need to inspect their in-trays a tad more thoroughly before claiming they’d not been offered the opportunity to provide grist for Prof Lewandowsky’s mill: in the process, um, providing grist for Prof Lewandowsky’s mill…

I’ve noticed the denial-o-sphere is becoming less adept at drawing even a tiny fig-leaf over their ridiculousness.

Andrew bolts article “Twisting Rinehart’s word to damn them” (I refuse to link to it – in any case, the HS website is returning a server error) showed a quite hilarious lack of self-awareness. The Bolter whined that poor little billionairess (“billion-heiress”?) Rinehart’s claim that the poor are poor because they can’t be arsed going out and making a billion like she did has been misrepresented by those mean old jealous socialists…

Aside from the fact Bolt’s whine is untrue (the representation has not been mis- at all), he conveniently forgets how he has misrepresented an endless number of climate scientists – Trenberth, Mann, Schneider, Jones…and allowed his winged monkeys to add to that in ways he wouldn’t dare personally.

I wonder if Tim Flannery must be having a little chuckle about the irony of this, given how Andrew verballed him shamelessly for years.

Either way, I almost (almost, mind) admire the baldfaced cheek that you need for this kind of weapons-grade hypocrisy. Or pity the level of cognative dissonance that must rattle in his brainpan. Whichever…

I sympathize with Pippa the Weather Girl’s frustrations. I honestly think what’s happening is so big that most – and not just the Deniers – are simply refusing to take it in.

It’s like an interesting suggestion I read the other day; if we pretend hard enough to still be having a debate about whether AGW is actually occuring at all – lock the whole issue away in a magical indeterminacy box with Schrödinger’scat, if you like – then clearly the Arctic melt isn’t really happening, and has no economic, cultural, political, or biological meaning.

For most it is, indeed, a great BBQ Labor Day Weekend. And over here there’s a new series of Doctor Who! Why worry?

@ Bill,
” I honestly think what’s happening is so big that most…….are simply refusing to take it in” Yes, you’re right Bill ,it’s very big. It’s a whopper. It comes out of the states where everything is big. It’s a huge lie which stretches from 1972 to the present.
Hard to get your head around at your age so you “are simply refusing to take it in.”

See, bill, a libertard HAS to live in a conspiracy world. Their ideology is ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, just like Stalinism. And therefore, if all the evidence shows ANY imperfection in that ideology MUST be produced by someone lying. And if that requires the entire rest of the world including nature to join in that lie, then that requires a CONSPIRACY.

Therefore, by the blind faith in the absolute perfection of libertarian ideology in the minds of the libertards, they HAVE to live in a conspiracy world.

Not that I ever visit her site (well not for several years anyway) but a commenter elsewhere drew attention to Codlin’Nova’s ongoing rants about the ‘Regulatory Class’ curtailing her (their) ‘freedoms’, nacho in pursuit of an oppressive one-weld gummint.

I guess it requires a special kind of mindset to equate freedom from being environmentally poisoned or sold shoddy and unsafe goods or finding your home is now next to a gas turbine engine test facility as a diminishment of the possible life experiences available to the truly free person.

Speaking of Lewandowsky, I’m going to circulate the comment that J Bowers has designated as ‘of the week‘ –

“The lesson in this is Mr McIntyre et al should be paying more attention to emails addressed to themselves and less attention to reading other peoples”

The irony of people over-reacting – though, of course, for them this is all ‘normal’ reaction – and giving said Prof rather more material to work with than a mere online survey might be expected to provide is truly entertaining…

Ever ride the Mad Mouse? You know that bit where you’ve buckled in to the funny little car, been pulled almost to the top of the ride on the motorised chain, and are just on the brink of being flung – unconstrained and irreversibly – into the ride?

That’s us…

Truly, ‘conservatives’ who passionately endorse conducting a radical experiment with the one atmosphere we possess are the nadir of the Human project.

“conservatives who passionately endorse conducting a radical experiment with the one atmosphere we possess” What bullshit you spout. Bill . Nobody in their right mind would passionately endorse that “experiment” irrespective of their political leanings

Chek, cheer up. At least Codling’s just Randing away harmlessly in her own little echo chamber. If she still had her old job fronting the outreach program for the National Science and Technology Centre (aka Questacon), think how many impressionable young minds she might be poisoning.

Fortunately, that program is run by rather less … well, insane … people now.

Solar forcing on the ice winter severity index in the western Baltic region

Abstract

The Sun is the fundamental energy sources of the Earth’s climate and therefore its variations can contribute to natural climate variations. In the present work we study the variability of ice winter severity index in the Baltic Sea since the 15th century and its possible connection with solar activity, based in a new method for finding and measuring amplitude-phase cross-frequency coupling in time series with a low signal/noise ratio, we suggests that the ice winter severity index in the Baltic Sea is modulated by solar activity and solar motion in several frequency bands during the last 500 yrs. According to our model a strong coupling between the decadal periodicity in the ice winter severity index time series and the secular periodicity of solar activity is present. We found that the ice winter severity index is strongly modulated by solar activity at the decadal periodicity. We also found that the 180 year periodicity of the Barycentre motion modulates the amplitudes of the decadal periodicity of solar activity and the Ice winter severity index. This method represents a useful tool for study the solar-terrestrial relationships.

Interesting paper (at least, what isn’t behind the paywall). I particularly noted Figure B1 and Figure B4. Based on these correlations, clearly we should be seeing more severe winters in the Western Baltic at the moment. And yet, we are actually seeing the worst sea ice conditions on record.

Karen still thinks arguing about Arctic sea ice helps her case. I still think thats funny.

Does Karen need repair work on her foot each time she posts, or does she just shoot through the same hole she made previously?

“During the pre industrial and post industrial period the dominant forcing was the solar activity(Barycentremotion)and we recommend that this forcing should be considered in the climatic models in order to have an accurate climate reconstruction. However,anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases are needed to study the late 20thcentury”.

Two points: first the minor one. The English is stiff and the paper needs some editing. Second, and more importantly, the authors, as expected, do not dispute the human fingerprint on the recent warming.

Its too bad that schmucks like Karen never read the full texts of the papers whose conclusions they distort. No wonder scientists get rightfully pissed off that their research is abused and twisted by the denialati.

High-volume and vituperative poster Smokey at Watts Up With That is the sock puppet of WUWT moderator David B Stealey (dbs). If you tune in quickly to 9/4 sea ice thread with a too-funny-to-parody title by Anthony, “has Arctic sea ice turned the corner?” you can catch Smokey/David Stealey talking out of both mouths. As moderator dbs he gets to delay or censor unwanted posts,
“[Snip. Policy. ~ dbs, mod.]”
while as pot-stirring Smokey he gets to name-call and toss insults freely with no fear of moderation.

Although the sock puppet has often proclaimed there’s no censorship at WUWT, the moderator Stealey or his colleagues have censored me twice on this thread alone … once for an on-topic post about sea ice, the second for a less polite (but still on topic) response when Smokey called me “crazy” for not believing his declaration that “Natural cycles fully explain all current observations.”

Its too bad that schmucks like Karen never read the full texts of the papers whose conclusions they distort.

Heck, half the time they never comprehend the abstract. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone like sunspot has posted a link to a paper claiming it supports claim C, only for someone to point out that it is obvious merely from reading the abstract that C is not supported (or even actively undermined).

Yes, it turns out that for his research into people’s acceptance of conspiracy theories, Lewandowsky *did* send the denialists survey invitations after all, BUT, the way he did it, the timing of the invites, the order of the questions, it was all a conspiracy!

… the second for a less polite (but still on topic) response when Smokey called me “crazy” …

That’s kind of funny. On one of the few times I ventured into Anthony’s site, I noticed he banned a poster for calling another poster’s argument “crazy”. See, Anthony has this friend with schizophrenia, and it’s really insensitive to use that word.

(Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bloke! Have a good wallow…)

The melting ice could have knock-on effects in the UK. Adam Scaife, from the Met Office Hadley Centre told Newsnight it could help explain this year’s miserable wet summer, by altering the course of the jet stream.

“Some studies suggest that there is increased risk of wet, low pressure summers over the UK as the ice melts.”

There may be an effect for our winters too: “Winter weather could become more easterly cold and snowy as the ice declines,” Mr Scaife said.

Summary/Result
[185] The plaintiff does not succeed on any of its challenges to the three decisions of NIWA in issue. The application for judicial review is dismissed and judgment entered for the defendant.

Costs

[186] The defendant is entitled to costs. Given the time involved and the steps taken, costs on a category 2 time band C would seem appropriate. However, if the parties are unable to agree I will receive memoranda and deal with the issue of costs on the basis of such memoranda.

In fact, the cascading eruption of allegations and theories about the paper and myself have illustrated the impoverished epistemology of climate denial better than any mountain of data could have done.

Indeed.

(The Fake Skeptic over-reaction also reminds me of those Christian Fundamentalist nutters – you know, the ones they soooo closely resemble? – who insist on making such an unholy fuss about some obscure ‘blasphemous’ cultural production that it becomes an instant global hit. You guys really cannot see yourselves from the outside at all, can you? And seem to actually a lack a functioning theory of mind with regard to others.)

Ah, September 2012 – not a grand time to be an idiot. Pity you’ve all done so much bloody damage already…

Not that there should be even a shadow of a doubt about it (but you never know until it’s over) and well done to NIWA!

It’s really a shame about the number of man-hours likely expended in achieving a judgement that could never realistically have gone any other way in a sane world.

I only hope the legal fiction of the denial ‘education trust’ that brought the action (and was in itself a form of mudslinging) can be disregarded or loop-holed and the organ grinders behind it will be pursued for every punitive penny.

Similar issues (as to the limited nature of his expertise), apply to the evidence of Mr Dedekind.

[54]… Mr Dedekind’s general expertise in basic statistical techniques does not extend to any particular specialised experience or qualifications in the specific field of applying statistical techniques in the field of climate science. To that extent, where Mr Dedekind purports to comment or give opinions as to NIWA’s application of statistical techniques in those fields, his evidence is of little assistance to the Court.

Like Bolt, O’Neill champions anti-intellectualism because he knows that it appeals to the second and third rate minds that make up the bulk of Murdoch’s readership.

“In public discourse, anti-intellectuals usually perceive and publicly present themselves as champions of the common folk — populists against political elitism and academic elitism — proposing that the educated are a social class detached from the everyday concerns of the majority…”

“Anti-intellectualism is a common facet of totalitarian dictatorships to oppress political dissent. The Nazi party’s populist rhetoric featured anti-intellectual rants as a common motif, including Adolf Hitler’s political polemic, Mein Kampf.”

Almost looks impressive if you don’t know what the map is actually of. Unfortunately for Joe, it’s a map of sea surface temperature, not ice concentration:http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/satellite/index.uk.php
Notice under “select parameter”, it says “sea surface temperature”.

Thing is, there’s absolutely no evidence anywhere of the deniers being right or AGW being false (or ending). Therefore the rank and file deniers have learned NEVER to look at any evidence to see if it’s right. If it supports AGW it is wrong, if it is said to support denialism, it’s right. And if it’s said to support denialism but doesn’t, then this is not looked into either.

They don’t look because whenever you look, “AGW is true” is the answer.

Since this is not acceptable to the denier, they have learned NEVER to look.

Why trust peer review when one’s right-wing ideology is more likely to give an agreeable answer? After all it’s cooling/plateauing/warming but it’s a natural cycle driven by the sun/cosmic rays/cellestial bodies/faries oh look over there it is cold somewhere.

I have been following the exploits of James Balog and co. through The Extreme Ice Survey for about five years now having heard of and obtained the National Geographic produced book ‘Extreme Ice Now’.

I look forward to seeing more of this film having been a keen pro-am photographer for many years. Although no longer able to do extreme activities myself I especially look forward to narrative on the technical challenges overcome.

‘Extreme Ice Now’ is a superbly illustrated and designed book, rather over designed in my opinion by being presented in a very thick card slip case which itself is as superbly produced and printed as the many photographic images inside. A little over-resource hungry considering the ecological cost of such lavish production.

Having written that the narrative in the book is still as valid now as it was when published in 2009. The clever introduction over four pages is in the form of a ‘cloze’ exercise based on these statement with the inserted words in bold:

How could humans affect this huge planet so much?

Could activists be creating a new cause to sell?

Could scientists be trying to generate research grants?

Could the computer models be wrong?

Could the media be over-hyping the science?

Though I was once a skeptic. I’m not any more.

The evidence is in the ice.

That truth in that last statement is now ever-so much clearer as the ice retreats faster than ever.

2) Rhinehart needs to get her story straight. Do the poor need to work harder for less so that they can all be billionairs like her, or do the rich need more corporate welfare and tax minimisation so that the poor can get the trickled-down richness? Of course, we all know that she wants both: she’s the Sheriff Nottingham to social responsibility’s Robin Hood.

3) If Joanne Codling thinks that listing “sceptics” who were not contacted by Lewendowsky’s project proves anything substantive, she’s even more crackers than I thought.

4) If Duff thinks that his summer was miserable this year, he should stick around for when global warming shits down the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, and ironically returns the UK to a more Siberian type of climate. Of course, if he can hang around for a few more centuries, it’ll eventually warm up again…

5) Warning – colourful language content… To all the fucking denialists who fucking claimed that we’re not fucking the planet with our fucking carbon emissions – we fucking told you so, and now you are fucking culpable for the fact that we’re fucking fucked.

There, now I feel a little better.

But the Arctic will still continue to melt more and more, year after year…

It’s no disrespect to the Duffer to say no-one should want him to stick around until the Thermohaline Circulation shuts down. That has a transit time of 1600 years! Current conditions in the Arctic may or may not shut down the start of that conveyor, but it will be hundreds of years for that to ripple through to the Gulf Stream – the end of the conveyor and Britain becoming sub-arctic.

In fact, once land ice starts haemorrhaging off Antarctic, the meltwater will turbocharge the thermohaline-driven deep ocean currents in the Indian and Pacific oceans – these eventually feed back into the Atlantic as warm water, and keep Britain cozy. ETA for ice-free Antarctica is unknown, but probably in the thousands-of-years timeframe.

OTOH, there are much shorter-term processes that will do the job. Warmer Arctic temps are weakening the Polar Cell which, via its interaction with the adjacent Ferrel Cell, is causing the Polar Jet to become less stable. Over time it will whip about more and more, dragging Arctic freezes from the north, or setting up those blocking highs like the ones that generated the US heatwaves and drought this year.

The “temperate” latitudes are not going to be so temperate anymore. Hansen et al have shown that a given amount of warming produces not just hotter weather, but more hot days. Between 50 and 60 north (Britains latitude), the jetstream flapping makes big heatwaves all the more likely, on top of this effect.

Duffer wants a barbecue summer. Pretty sure that falls under “careful what you wish for”.

wrt to your piont 2 – the billion-heiress provoke an amusing response in today’s print version of the Telly, to the effect that if she is so sure she knows how to amek a billion from nothing, maybe she should give away the fortune she inherited and go make another from scratch. Any bets?

Bob Carter must have had his irony meter removed when he made this statement to the NZ High Court.

“Applied science in any field must take into account the current state of knowledge as attested by the peer-reviewed literature. Any departures from established knowledge or authority must be noted and explained. If one disagrees with the established literature, then the remedy is to write a critical paper with full reasoning and have it published in a suitable journal.”

And no, not the end of the world. Just the approaching of the end of an ammenable climate such as we evolved to thrive in. Oh, and the small matter of the extinction of multiple thousands of species of both practical and intrinsic value.

James Balog – Time-Lapse photography of Greenland Ice loss:http://youtu.be/DjeIpjhAqsM
It’s a good talk, but if you only have time to watch 30 seconds of it, flick forward to 10:50. Now *that* is truly shocking.

Jo Nova is drooling over some kind of new crank paper by Jinan Cao.
I think she thinks he’s put the final nail in the coffin of the hoax that is global warming. Or something.

Anyway, it would be nice if somebody who can count can have a look at it and tell her and her cult of group-thinkers where he’s gone wrong.
It looks to me that he’s trying to change the results of the Stephan-Boltzmann equation by excluding the bulk of the mass of the atmosphere using the excuse that most of it isn’t radiating. He seems to be saying that CO2’s heat content is independent of the molecules surrounding it. But as I’m no good at counting, I’m not sure if this is correct.

“Prof Wadhams calculates this absorption of the sun’s rays is having an effect “the equivalent of about 20 years of additional CO2 being added by man””
“If his calculations are correct then that means that over recent decades the melting of the Arctic ice cap has put as much heat into the system as all the CO2 we have generated in that time.”

Thanks chaps 😉 you’re a constant source of amusement. Pop back every now and then for a laugh and you seldom fail to deliver. Mashey’s off on his latest “conspiracy theory”, which according to Lew is solely a denier “trait” I thought.

More fun to come from you all I’m sure. “Slash BJ”, a mental image that will haunt for some time.

Ewww, icky! You’d send people for whom you have respect over there?! To one of the shameless purveyors of demonstrable lies, nonsense, and conspiracy theories? That one’s battier than Bradman, and not in the good way!

So, GSW, are you willing to enter into a bet with me about the future trajectory of Arctic sea ice? I’ll even give you better odds that I was offering Jonas et al, and I’ll bring forward the landmark dates so that you don’t have to wait too long – but be warned, I’ll be upping the amounts involved…

She’s censored all my posts despite them being about 1,000,000 X less offensive and about 1,000,000 X more factual than the dross her swarm of lobotomites have to offer.

Would you believe it, her blogged response to Lewandowsky’s internet survey has now reached 5 looong and pointless parts?
Would you believe she has written her 4 further parts without apologising for the mistakes and false accusations that were in her Part 1? Of course you would – if there’s one thing a denialist just can’t do, it’s to admit it when they are caught being totally wrong.

I’m interested in Arctic sea ice trends for one very specific reason – their trajectories are directly and intimately tied to global warming. My offers of wager were very earnest, and I would very happily have used a mutually-acceptable and well-known figure as an escrow intermediary.

That no-one on your (crazy, denialist) side of the fence had anything remotely resembling any cahoonas simply serves to demonstrate that you really, deep-down, do not believe what you spout.

I have no recollection of precipitation-forecast bets, but if they were offered I’d want some really specific conditions, and some very specific science with which to refer. See, you’re comparing apples with oranges: we know that warming the planet will melt the ice, but we’re much less able to say a priori how precipitation in particular areas will be affected.

This is in no way a refutation of the fact of ‘greenhouse’ gas warming of the atmosphere however, and to say otherwise is to engage in logical fallacy in order to wriggle out of the fundament point – do you have the guts to put your money on evidence that the planet is either warming as the physics of global warming dictates, or on your fantasy of a magical world where the laws of nature are suspended, especially when this would concur with your ideology?

So, if ‘greenhouse’ gases warm the planet as I and many professionals claim, the Arctic ice will melt essentially as I have projected in my wagers. Are you prepared to bet that you are right, and that I am wrong?

A simple “yes” or “no” will do. That’s enough to show us how much you believe your own waffle.

Come on you chickenshit little fuck. Take me up on one of my bets. Better still, here’s my new wager, structured to be more kind to you:

I’ll put down two hundred grams of gold for your 500 grams of the same gold (who can trust dollars of any denomination over then next few years?) that the PIOMAS one-day arctic sea ice volume will fall below 1000 km3 before 2020. Remember, you don’t believe that humans are warming the planet, and I’m calling the bet, so your faith in your claim is supported by your higher risk.

And to be entirely fair, I’ll point out that if one considers just the last three years of ice volume decrease (if such is actually occurring as a result of this ‘non-existent’ global warming), the 2020 PIOMAS one-day arctic sea ice volume would be in the range of 800 km3. My offer is valid for 24 hours from the time of posting.

It’s been a pretty bad year fro the deniers like GSW – protracted record warmth in the United States, Arcitc Iced measured at an all-time low and even near the basal end of IPCC predictions etc. So all they have left is to accuse their opponents of producing comspiracy theories and the like. At the same time, its hardly shcoking news that many, if not most of the denier with blogs, are not driven by the quest for scientific truth but in using science as a beating stick to bolster their political and economic idealogies.And those are of course laissaz-faire capitalism and deregulation. This is hardly conspiracy level stuff but plain, hard fact.

As for GSW – recall his puerile discussion of polar bear demographics and global amphibian declines. Pretty appalling ignorance there, but par for the course with the D-K denier mob.

On the Balog TED talk, keep in mind that happened back in 2009. Yes it was shocking then but still we had all the BS from the likes of the now exposed, again, Moranos and Pielke Jrs of the world.

I wonder if all these have some escape plan somewhere, not to escape the wrath of Mother Nature, from SkS because they would fail with that but to escape the wrath of the world’s people when they are fully outed as the deluded or shills they are.